It is most definitely a racket, and their "repuation" score severely affected our reputation with existing clients. Same deployment procedure as had been for y

It is most definitely a racket, and their "repuation" score severely affected our reputation with existing clients. Same deployment procedure as had been for years (we'd previously been code-signing with a GoDaddy cert) with Click-Once deployment (was a .Net Office add-in), all of a sudden we start getting dinged. The cost to the company (a relatively small company) was significant. Had to buy a Symantec code-signing cert (~$900), had to ditch ClickOnce and invest in InstallShield (don't recall the license cost) and engineer the installer to both sign the installed libs & the installer itself. All of this because Symantec hadn't seen the new libs enough because, well, we targeted a smaller corporate audience (for argument sake, we had around a 100 clients, of which, each would only have 1 or 2 installs of this particular app).